"Sometimes I just want to slap him across the face and say 'Why the f*ck can't you be more interesting!?'"

Thus spoke the viper-tongued young lady at my bar one quiet Sunday night. She was three Manhattans in and talking to me as if we were old friends, which we weren't.

Her remarks, I told her, reminded me of a basketball coach I once had who, in the heat of battle many years ago, when we were in the huddle after an urgent and final timeout, sixty seconds on the clock, the game down to the wire, this coach's face beet-red, spit flying, said to us seriously: "I told you guys not to let them make baskets!"

The real question, of course, is not whether to be interesting but how does one become interesting? Is it really so hard? Surveys say two out of every three people are boring. Are you one of them?

Of course you're not. You're far too interesting for that.
In fact, you broke away from the pack a long time ago. You're a different breed, a dog of a different color.You learned early on that to be interesting is, in the most fundamental sense, to command the attention of others -- and others, by and large, want to be entertained. You learned long ago that, in actuality, it takes a certain kind of work to be boring, whereas to be interesting it's ... what?

It's mostly a question of habit - and the true secret of habit is the insight that habit is discipline and that your habits are what you choose them to be. Bartenders - real bartenders - pay close attention to what holds the interest of their customers.Why so?
Because the bar is a microcosm of life:
The bar is a metaphor.
The bartender is neither God nor government but a little of both: she is the orchestrator. Which is why, for better or worse, every bar takes on the personality of its head bartender.

These methods are far from exhaustive, but one thing I promise you: they work.

Table of Contents

1. It's Not How Clever And How Smart You ARE - It's How Clever And Smart You WANT to Be

2. How To Be Wickedly Charismatic
3. The Awesome Power of Your Eyes
4. How to Penetrate People's Brains as though You're Telepathic
5.How to Charm the Pants off Anyone Without Saying a Single Word
6. How to have People Dying to Hear What You'll Say Next
7. How to Answer the Age-Old Question: What Do You Do?
8. How To Become A Freakishly Brilliant Small-Talker by Doing One Simple Thing
9. How To Come Across As Diabolically Clever
10. Ten Authentic Signs of Intelligence that Cannot Be Faked
11. Lynchpin
12. Are You Fascinating?
13. How to be Unforgettable
14. How to be the Smartest Person in the Bar
17. High-School Basketball Star
18. What is Friendship?
19. The Brown-Eyed Beauty of Distilled Spirits
20. Whisky, Whiskey, White-Lightning, Moonraker, Moonshine
21. Waitress
22. The Sudsbuster